As you’d expect from a man who had to cre­ate, in painstak­ing detail, all the races that pop­u­late Mid­dle-Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien had lit­tle time for sim­ple racism. He had espe­cial­ly lit­tle time for the high­est-pro­file sim­ple racism of his day, the wave of anti-Jew­ish sen­ti­ment on which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi par­ty rode straight into the Sec­ond World War. His first nov­el The Hob­bit, pre­de­ces­sor to the Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy, first appeared in 1937, a time when the sit­u­a­tion in Europe had turned omi­nous indeed, and would get far ugli­er still. It did­n’t take long after the book’s ini­tial suc­cess for Berlin pub­lish­er Rüt­ten & Loen­ing to express their inter­est in putting out a Ger­man edi­tion, but first — in obser­vance, no doubt, of the Third Reich’s dic­tates — they asked for proof of Tolkien’s “Aryan descent.” The author draft­ed two replies, the less civ­il of which reads as fol­lows:

25 July 1938
20 North­moor Road, Oxford 

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your let­ter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extrac­tion: that is Indo-Iran­ian; as far as I am aware none of my ances­tors spoke Hin­dus­tani, Per­sian, Gyp­sy, or any relat­ed dialects. But if I am to under­stand that you are enquir­ing whether I am of Jew­ish ori­gin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ances­tors of that gift­ed peo­ple. My great-great-grand­fa­ther came to Eng­land in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry from Ger­many: the main part of my descent is there­fore pure­ly Eng­lish, and I am an Eng­lish sub­ject — which should be suf­fi­cient. I have been accus­tomed, nonethe­less, to regard my Ger­man name with pride, and con­tin­ued to do so through­out the peri­od of the late regret­table war, in which I served in the Eng­lish army. I can­not, how­ev­er, for­bear to com­ment that if imper­ti­nent and irrel­e­vant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in mat­ters of lit­er­a­ture, then the time is not far dis­tant when a Ger­man name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubt­less made in order to com­ply with the laws of your own coun­try, but that this should be held to apply to the sub­jects of anoth­er state would be improp­er, even if it had (as it has not) any bear­ing what­so­ev­er on the mer­its of my work or its sus­tain­abil­i­ty for pub­li­ca­tion, of which you appear to have sat­is­fied your­selves with­out ref­er­ence to my Abstam­mung.

I trust you will find this reply sat­is­fac­to­ry, and 

remain yours faith­ful­ly,

J. R. R. Tolkien

“I have in this war a burn­ing pri­vate grudge  against that rud­dy lit­tle igno­ra­mus Adolf Hitler,” Tolkien wrote to his son Michael three years lat­er, by which time the war had reached a new height. “Ruin­ing, per­vert­ing, mis­ap­ply­ing, and mak­ing for ever accursed, that noble north­ern spir­it, a supreme con­tri­bu­tion to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”

He had already faced Ger­man forces in com­bat dur­ing his ser­vice in World War I, and had almost became one of World War II’s code­break­ers after the British For­eign Office’s cryp­to­graph­ic depart­ment brought the pos­si­bil­i­ty to him in ear­ly 1939. He did not, in the event, par­tic­i­pate direct­ly in the con­flict, but he did leave behind an uncom­mon­ly elo­quent paper trail doc­u­ment­ing his stance of unam­bigu­ous antipa­thy for the Nazis and their ide­ol­o­gy.

For more such fas­ci­nat­ing per­spec­tives vouch­safed to his­to­ry through the mail, do have a look at Let­ters of Note: An Eclec­tic Col­lec­tion of Cor­re­spon­dence Deserv­ing of a Wider Audi­ence, the brand new book from the site of the same name. Tolkien’s let­ter above comes from it, as do many of the illu­mi­nat­ing mis­sives we’ve fea­tured here before — and, with­out a doubt, those we’ll con­tin­ue to fea­ture in the future.

Want to down­load a Tolkien audio book for free? Start a 30-day free tri­al with Audible.com and you can down­load one of his major works in unabridged for­mat. You can keep the book regard­less of whether you con­tin­ue with their great pro­gram or not. There are no strings attached.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Tolkien Pro­fes­sor” Presents Three Free Cours­es on The Lord of the Rings

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

C.S. Lewis’ Pre­scient 1937 Review of The Hob­bit by J.R.R. Tolkien: It “May Well Prove a Clas­sic”

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

You sure­ly heard plen­ty about Shake­speare’s birth­day yes­ter­day. But did you hear about Shake­speare’s bee­hive? No, the Bard did­n’t moon­light as an api­arist, though in his main line of work as a poet and drama­tist he sure­ly had to con­sult his dic­tio­nary fair­ly often. The ques­tion of whether human­i­ty has an iden­ti­fi­able copy of such an illus­tri­ous ref­er­ence vol­ume gets explored in the new book Shake­speare’s Bee­hive: An Anno­tat­ed Eliz­a­bethan Dic­tio­nary Comes to Light by book­seller-schol­ars George Kop­pel­man and Daniel Wech­sler. In their study, they reveal that they may have come into pos­ses­sion of Shake­speare’s very own copy of Baret’s Alvearie, a pop­u­lar clas­si­cal quote-laden Eng­lish-Latin-Greek-French dic­tio­nary the man who wrote King Lear would have found “the per­fect tool, a hon­ey-combed bee­hive of pos­si­bil­i­ties that may not have formed his way of think­ing, but cer­tain­ly fed his appetite and nour­ished his selec­tion.” He would have, at least, if indeed he owned it. Some sol­id Shake­speare schol­ar­ship points toward his own­ing a copy of Baret’s Alvearie, but did he own this one, the rich­ly anno­tat­ed one these guys found on eBay?

Experts haven’t exact­ly stepped for­ward in force to back up their claim. Plau­si­ble objec­tions include, as Adam Gop­nik puts it in a (sub­scribers-only) New York­er piece on this Alvearie in par­tic­u­lar and human­i­ty’s desire for Shake­speare­an arti­facts in gen­er­al: “the hand­writ­ing just does­n’t look like Shake­speare’s,” “since Shake­speare wrote Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish, any work of Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish is going to con­tain echoes of Shake­speare,” and, of all pos­si­ble anno­ta­tors of this par­tic­u­lar phys­i­cal book, Shake­speare “is a prime can­di­date only because we don’t know the names of all the oth­er bird-lov­ing, inquis­i­tive read­ers who also liked their dabchicks and their French verbs.” Still, in a strik­ing act of open­ness, Kop­pel­man and Wech­sler have made their — and Shake­speare’s? — Alvearie avail­able for your dig­i­tal perusal on their site. You have to reg­is­ter as a mem­ber first, but then you can draw your own con­clu­sions about Kop­pel­man and Weschler’s dis­cov­ery — or, as even they call it, their “leap of faith.” Over­en­thu­si­as­tic words, per­haps, but sel­dom do either suc­cess­ful anti­quar­i­an book deal­ers or ded­i­cat­ed Shake­speare fans lack enthu­si­asm.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed  Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er What Shakespeare’s Hand­writ­ing Looked Like, and How It Solved a Mys­tery of Author­ship

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

From the 20/20 point of view of the present, Joseph Stal­in was one of the 20th century’s great mon­sters. He ter­ri­fied the Sovi­et Union with cam­paign after cam­paign of polit­i­cal purges, he moved whole pop­u­la­tions into Siberia and he arguably killed more peo­ple than Hitler. But it took decades for the scope of his crimes to get out, most­ly because, unlike Hitler, Stal­in stuck to killing his own peo­ple.

In ear­ly 1930s, how­ev­er, Stal­in was con­sid­ered by many to be the leader of the future. That peri­od was, of course, the nadir of the Great Depres­sion. Cap­i­tal­ism seemed to be com­ing apart at the seams. The USSR promised a new soci­ety ruled not by the oli­garchs of Wall Street but by the peo­ple — a soci­ety where every­one was equal.

H.G. Wells inter­viewed Stal­in in Moscow in 1934 for the mag­a­zine The New States­man. Wells was an avowed social­ist and one of the left’s most influ­en­tial authors. His first nov­el, The Time Machine, is essen­tial­ly an alle­go­ry for class strug­gle after all. The inter­view between the two is fas­ci­nat­ing.

Wells opens the piece by stat­ing that he speaks for the com­mon peo­ple. While that point is debat­able — Stal­in calls him out on that asser­tion – Wells does speak in a man­ner that is read­i­ly under­stand­able. Stal­in, in con­trast, speaks in flu­ent Polit­buro. The bland­ness of his speech, choked with Com­mu­nist boil­er­plate, seems designed to make the lis­ten­er tune out. But then he drops lit­tle bon mots into his mono­logues that hint at the vio­lence he has unleashed on his coun­try. Take this line for instance:

Rev­o­lu­tion, the sub­sti­tu­tion of one social sys­tem for anoth­er, has always been a strug­gle, a painful and a cru­el strug­gle, a life-and-death strug­gle.

It’s a chill­ing line. Espe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er that at the time of this inter­view, Stal­in was just start­ing to launch his first wave of polit­i­cal purges and he was plot­ting to assas­si­nate his main polit­i­cal rival Sergei Kirov.

As the inter­view unfolds, you can imag­ine Wells grow­ing increas­ing­ly frus­trat­ed by Stalin’s nar­row, dog­mat­ic view of the world. The Sovi­et leader, as Wells lat­er wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “has lit­tle of the quick uptake of Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt and none of the sub­tle­ty and tenac­i­ty of Lenin. … His was not a free impul­sive brain nor a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly orga­nized brain; it was a trained Lenin­ist-Marx­ist brain.”

At sev­er­al points in the inter­view Wells chal­lenges Stal­in: “I object to this sim­pli­fied clas­si­fi­ca­tion of mankind into poor and rich,” the author fumes.

And when Stal­in doesn’t agree with Wells that the Cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem was on its last legs, the author actu­al­ly chides him for not being rev­o­lu­tion­ary enough. “It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr. Stal­in; I think the old sys­tem is near­er to its end than you think.” Now that’s chutz­pah.

In the end, the inter­view presents a duel­ing ver­sion of the future of the left. Wells believed, in essence, that the Cap­i­tal­ist world only need­ed to be reformed, albeit dras­ti­cal­ly, to achieve eco­nom­ic jus­tice. And Stal­in argued that Cap­i­tal­ism had to be torn down com­plete­ly before any oth­er reform could take place.

In spite of their dif­fer­ences, Wells left the inter­view with a pos­i­tive impres­sion of the Sovi­et leader. “I have nev­er met a man more fair, can­did, and hon­est,” he wrote.

Wells died in 1946 before the worst of Stalin’s crimes became known to the out­side world. Stal­in died in 1953.  Fol­low­ing a stroke, his body remained on the floor in a pool of urine for hours before a doc­tor was called. His min­ions were ter­ri­fied that he might wake up and order their exe­cu­tion.

You can read the entire inter­view between H.G. Wells and Stal­in on The New States­men’s web­site here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism: A 1955 Man­u­al from the U.S. Mil­i­tary

Leon Trot­sky: Love, Death and Exile in Mex­i­co

Learn Russ­ian from our List of Free Lan­guage Lessons

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.